Magic, page 25
“Orangutan” is from a Malay word meaning “man of the forest.” The Malays, who were there on the spot, were more accurate in their description, for the orangutan is a forest dweller and not a cave dweller, but either way it cannot be considered near enough to man to warrant the Homo designation.
The French naturalist Georges de Buffon was the first, in the middle 1700s, to describe the gibbons, which represent a third kind of anthropoid ape. The various gibbons are the smallest of the anthropoids and the least like man.
They are sometimes put to one side for that reason, the remaining anthropoids being called the “great apes.”
As the classification of species grew more detailed, naturalists were more and more tempted to break down the barriers between them. Some species were so similar to other species that it was uncertain whether any boundary at all could be drawn between them. Besides, more and more animals showed signs of being caught in the middle of change, so to speak.
The horse, Buffon noted, had two “splints” on either side of its leg bones, which seemed to indicate that once there had been three lines of bones there and three hoofs to each leg.
Buffon argued that if hoofs and bones could degenerate, so might entire species. Perhaps God had created only certain species and that each of these had, to some extent, degenerated and formed additional species. If horses could lose some of their hoofs, why might not some of them have degenerated all the way to donkeys?
Since Buffon wished to speculate on what was, after all, the big news in man-centered natural history, he suggested that apes were degenerated men.
Buffon was the first to talk of the mutability of species. Here, however, he avoided the worst danger—that of suggesting that man-the-image-of-God had once been something else—but he did say that man could become something else. Even that was too much, for once the boundaries were made to leak in one direction, it would be hard to make them leakproof in the other. The pressure was placed on Buffon to recant, and recant he did.
The notion of the mutability of species did not die, however. A British physician, Erasmus Darwin, had the habit of writing long poems of indifferent quality in which he presented his ofttimes interesting scientific theories. In his last book, Zoonomia, published in 1796, he amplified Buffon’s ideas and suggested that species underwent changes as a result of the direct influence upon them of the environment.
This notion was carried still further by the French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, who, in 1809, published Zoological Philosophy and was the first scientist of note to advance a theory of evolution, a thoroughgoing description of the mechanisms by which an antelope, for instance, could conceivably change, little by little over the generations, into a giraffe. (Both Darwin and Lamarck were virtually ostracized for their views by the Establishments, both scientific and non-scientific, of those days.)
Lamarck was wrong in his notion of the evolutionary mechanism, but his book made the concept of evolution well known in the scientific world and it inspired others to find a perhaps more workable mechanism.[2]
The man who turned the trick was the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin (grandson of Erasmus Darwin), who spent nearly twenty years gathering data and polishing his argument. This he did, first, because he was a naturally meticulous man. Secondly, he knew the fate that awaited anyone who advanced an evolutionary theory, and he wanted to disarm the enemy by making his arguments cast-iron.
When he published his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, he carefully refrained from discussing man in it. That didn’t help, of course. He was a gentle and virtuous person, as nearly a saint as any cleric in the kingdom, but if he had bitten his mother to death, he couldn’t have been denounced more viciously.
Yet the evidence in favor of evolution had kept piling up. In 1847 the largest of the anthropoid apes, the gorilla, was finally brought into the light of European day, and it was the most dramatic ape of all. In size, at least, it seemed most nearly human, or even superhuman.
Then, too, in 1856 the very first fossil remnants of an organism that was clearly more advanced than any of the living anthropoids and as clearly more primitive than any living man was discovered in the Neander valley in Germany. This was “Neanderthal man.” Not only was the evidence in favor of evolution steadily rising, but so was the evidence in favor of human evolution.
In 1863 the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell published The Antiquity of Man, which used the evidence of ancient stone tools to argue that mankind was much older than the six thousand years allotted him (and the Universe) in the Bible. He also came out strongly in favor of the Darwinian view of evolution.
And in 1871 Darwin finally carried the argument to man with his book The Descent of Man.
The antievolutionists remain with us, of course, to this day, ardent and firm in their cause. I get more than my share of letters from them, so that I know what their arguments are like.
They concentrate on one point, and on one point only—the descent of man. I have never once received any letter arguing emotionally that the beaver is not related to the rat or that the whale is not descended from a land mammal. I sometimes think they don’t even realize that evolution applies to all species. Their only insistence is that man is not, not, NOT descended from or related to apes or monkeys.
Some evolutionists try to counter this by saying that Darwin never said that man is descended from monkeys; that no living primate is an ancestor of man. This, however, is a quibble. The evolutionary view is that man and the apes had some common ancestor that is not alive today but that looked like a primitive ape when it was alive. Going farther back, man’s various ancestors had a distinct monkeyish appearance—to the nonzoologist at least.
As an evolutionist, I prefer to face that fact without flinching. I am perfectly prepared to maintain that man did descend from monkeys, as the simplest way of stating what I believe to be the fact.
And we’ve got to stick to monkeys in another way, too. Evolutionists may talk about the “early hominids,” about “Homo erectus,” the “Australopithecines,” and so on. We may use that as evidence of the evolution of man and of the type of organism from which he descended.
This, I suspect, doesn’t carry conviction to the antievolutionists or even bother them much. Their view seems to be that when a bunch of infidels who call themselves scientists find a tooth here, a thigh bone there, and a piece of skull yonder and jigsaw them all together into a kind of ape man, that doesn’t mean a thing.
From the mail I get and from the literature I’ve seen, it seems to me that the emotionalism of the anitevolutionist boils itself down to man and monkey, and nothing more.
There are two ways in which an antievolutionist, it seems to me, can handle the man-and-monkey issue. He can stand pat on the Bible, declare that it is divinely inspired and that it says man was created out of the dust of the Earth by God, in the image of God, six thousand years ago, and that’s it. If that is his position, his views are clearly non-negotiable, and there is no point in trying to negotiate. I will discuss the weather with such a person, but not evolution.
A second way is for the antievolutionist to attempt some rational justification for his stand; a justification that is, that does not rest on authority, but can be tested by observation or experiment and argued logically. For instance, one might argue that the differences between man and all other animals are so fundamental that it is unthinkable that they be bridged and that no animal can conceivably develop into a man by the operation of nothing more than the laws of nature—that supernatural intervention is required.
An example of such an unbridgeable difference is a claim, for instance, that man has a soul and that no animal has one, and that a soul cannot be developed by an evolutionary procedure. —Unfortunately, there is no way of measuring or detecting a soul by those methods known to science. In fact, one cannot even define a soul except by referring to some sort to mystical authority. This falls outside observation or experiment, then.
On a less exalted plane, an antievolutionist might argue that man has a sense of right and wrong; that he has an appreciation of justice; that he is, in short, a moral organism while animals are not and cannot be.
That, I think, leaves room for argument. There are animals that act as though they love their young and that sometimes give their lives for them. There are animals that cooperate and protect each other in danger. Such behavior has survival value and it is exactly the sort of thing that evolutionists would expect to see developed bit by bit, until it reaches the level found in man.
If you were to argue that such apparently “human” behavior in animals is purely mechanical and is done without understanding, then once again we are back to argument by mere assertion. We don’t know what goes on inside an animal’s mind and, for that matter, it is by no means certain that our own behavior isn’t as mechanical as that of animals—only a degree more complicated and versatile.
There was a time when things were easier than they are now, when comparative anatomy was in its beginnings, and when it was possible to suppose that there was some gross physiological difference that set off man from all other animals. In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher René Descartes thought the pineal gland was the seat of the soul, for he accepted the then-current notion that this gland was found only in the human being and in no other organism whatever.
Alas, not so. The pineal gland is found in all vertebrates and is most highly developed in a certain primitive reptile called the tuatara. As a matter of fact, there is no portion of the physical body which the human being owns to the exclusion of all other species.
Suppose we get more subtle and consider the biochemistry of organisms. Here the differences are much less marked than in the physical shape of the body and its parts. Indeed, there is so much similarity in the biochemical workings of all organisms, not only if we compare men and monkeys, but if we compare men and bacteria, that if it weren’t for preconceived notions and species-centered conceit, the fact of evolution would be considered self-evident.
We must get very subtle indeed and begin to study the very fine chemical structure of the all but infinitely versatile protein molecule in order to find something distinctive for each species. Then, by the tiny differences in that chemical structure, one can get a rough measure of how long ago in time two organisms may have branched away from a common ancestor.
By studying protein structure, we find no large gaps; no differences between one species and all others that is so huge as to indicate a common ancestor so long ago that in all the history of Earth there was no time for such divergence to have taken place. If such a large gap existed between one species and all the rest, then that one species would have arisen from a different globule of primordial life than that which gave birth to all the rest. It would still have evolved, still have descended from more primitive species, but it would not be related to any other earthly life form. I repeat, however, that no such gap has been found and none is expected. All earthly life is interrelated.
Certainly man is not separated from other forms of life by some large biochemical gap. Biochemically, he falls within the Primates group and is not particularly more separate than the others are. In fact, he seems quite closely related to the chimpanzee. The chimpanzee, by the protein structure test, is closer to man than to the gorilla or orangutan.
So it is from the chimpanzee, specifically, that the antievolutionist must protect us. Surely, if, in Congreve’s words, we “look long upon the monkey,” meaning the chimpanzee in this case, we must admit it differs from us in nothing vital but the brain. The human brain is four times the size of the chimpanzee brain!
It might seem that even this large difference in size is but a difference in degree, and one that can be easily explained by evolutionary development—especially since fossil hominids had brains intermediate in size between the chimpanzee and modern man.
The antievolutionist, however, might dismiss fossil hominids as unworthy of discussion and go on to maintain that it is not the physical size of the brain that counts, but the quality of the intelligence it mediates. It can be argued that human intelligence so far surpasses chimpanzee intelligence that any thought of a relationship between the two species is out of the question.
For instance, a chimpanzee cannot talk. Efforts to teach young chimpanzees to talk, however patient, skillful, and prolonged, have always failed. And without speech, the chimpanzee remains nothing but an animal: intelligent for an animal, but just an animal. With speech, man climbs to the heights of Plato, Shakespeare, and Einstein.
But might it be that we are confusing communication with speech? Speech is, admittedly, the most effective and delicate form of communication ever conceived. (Our modern devices from books to television sets transmit speech in other forms, but speech still.) —But is speech all?
Human speech depends upon human ability to control rapid and delicate movements of throat, mouth, tongue, and lips and all this, seems to be under the control of a portion of the brain called “Broca’s convolution.” If Broca’s convolution is damaged by a tumor or by a blow, a human being suffers from aphasia and can neither speak nor understand speech. —Yet such a human being retains intelligence and is able to make himself understood by gesture, for instance.
The section of the chimpanzee brain equivalent to Broca’s convolution is not large enough or complex enough to make speech in the human sense possible. But what about gesture? Chimpanzees use gestures to communicate in the wild—
Back in June 1966, then, Beatrice and Allen Gardner at the University of Nevada chose a one-and-a-half-year-old female chimpanzee they named Washoe and decided to try to teach her a deaf-and-dumb language. The results amazed them and the world.
Washoe readily learned dozens of signs, using them appropriately to communicate desires and abstractions. She invented new modifications which she also used appropriately. She tried to teach the language to other chimpanzees, and she clearly enjoyed communicating.
Other chimpanzees have been similarly trained. Some have been taught to arrange and rearrange magnetized counters on a wall. In so doing, they showed themselves capable of taking grammar into account and were not fooled when their teachers deliberately created nonsense sentences.
Nor is it a matter of conditioned reflexes. Every line of evidence shows that chimpanzees know what they are doing, in the same sense that human beings know what they are doing when they talk.
To be sure, the chimpanzee language is very simple compared to man’s. Man is still enormously the more intelligent. However, Washoe’s feat makes even our ability to speak differ from the chimpanzee’s in degree only, not in kind.
“Look long upon a monkey.” There are no valid arguments, save those resting on mystical authority, that serve to deny the cousinship of the chimpanzee to man or the evolutionary development of Homo sapiens from non-Homo non-sapiens.
THINKING ABOUT THINKING
I HAVE JUST RETURNED FROM A VISIT to Great Britain. In view of my antipathy to traveling (which has not changed), I never thought I would walk the streets of London or stand under the stones of Stonehenge, but I did. Of course, I went by ocean liner both ways, since I don’t fly.
The trip was an unqualified success. The weather during the ocean crossing was calm; the ships fed me (alas) all I could eat; the British were impeccably kind to me, even though they did stare a bit at my varicolored clothes, and frequently asked me what my bolo ties were.
Particularly pleasant to me was Steve Odell, who was publicity director of Mensa, the organization of high-IQ people which more or less sponsored my visit. Steve squired me about, showed me the sights, kept me from falling into ditches and under cars, and throughout maintained what he called his “traditional British reserve.”
For the most part, I managed to grasp what was said to me despite the funny way the British have of talking. One girl was occasionally incomprehensible, however, and I had to ask her to speak more slowly. She seemed amused by my failure to understand her, although I, of course, attributed it to her imperfect command of the language. “You,” I pointed out, “understand me.”
“Of course I understand you,” she said. “You speak slowly in a Yankee drool.”
I had surreptitiously wiped my chin before I realized that the poor thing was trying to say “drawl.”
But I suppose the most unusual part of the trip (which included three speeches, three receptions, innumerable interviews by the various media, and five hours of book signing at five bookstores in London and Birmingham) was being made a vice-president of International Mensa.
I took it for granted that the honor was bestowed upon me for the sake of my well-known intelligence, but I thought of it during my five-day return on the Queen Elizabeth 2 and it dawned on me that I didn’t really know much about intelligence. I assume I am intelligent, but how can I know?
So I think I had better think about it—and where better than here among all my Gentle Friends and Readers?
One common belief connects intelligence with (1) the ready accumulation of items of knowledge; (2) the retention of such items, and (3) the quick recall, on demand, of such items.
The average person, faced with someone like myself (for instance) who displays all these characteristics in abundant degree, is quite ready to place the label of “intelligent” upon the displayer and to do so in greater degree the more dramatic the display.
Yet surely this is wrong. One may possess all three characteristics and yet give evidence of being quite stupid; and, on the other hand, one may be quite unremarkable in these respects and yet show unmistakable signs of what would surely be considered intelligence.
